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®ur Better Ipoition. 



Hebrews XI, 40. God having provided some better thing for us. 



THE THIRTEENTH ANNUAL SERMON OF THE NEW 
ENGLAND SOCIETY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK, 
PREACHED AT THE BRICK PRESBYTERIAN 
CHURCH, ON SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15, 1912, BY THE 
REVEREND WILLIAM PIERSON MERRILL, D.D. 



®uc Better portion. 



Hebrews XI, 40. God having provided some better thing for us. 



THE THIRTEENTH ANNUAL SERMON OF THE NEW 
ENGLAND SOCIETY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK, 
PREACHED AT THE BRICK PRESBYTERIAN 
CHURCH, ON SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15, 1912, BY THE 
REVEREND WILLIAM PIERSON MERRILL, D.D. 



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®ur Better jportion. 



Hebrews XI, 40. God having provided some better thing for us. 



The Puritan of Old England and of New Eng- 
land was one of God's best gifts to the world. 
Few figures in history have been more faithful to 
the best that lay back of him, more prophetic of 
good to come after him. He re-incarnated the 
spirit of the great Hebrew prophets. The law of 
Moses, the ethical passion of Amos, the God-con- 
sciousness of Isaiah, the theocratic dreams of 
Ezekiel, came to life and took shape through the 
Puritan. And from him have come those mighty 
movements that make up modern social, political 
and religious life. To him religious liberty, sepa- 
ration of church and state, democracy, were 
dangerous notions : yet his spirit has made all 
these notions into facts. We need have no fear 
of honoring too highly that little company of iron- 
hearted men who stood for God and righteousness 
in the old and new world of their day. 



The thinking world joins with us in reckoning 
these men among the greatest gifts of God to His 
world. It is not only the spirit of a son of New 
England, it is also the spirit of a careful historian, 
that speaks in the words of John Fiske, "It is not 
too much to say that in the seventeenth century 
the entire political future of mankind was staked 
upon the questions that were at issue in England. 
To keep the sacred flame of liberty alive required 
such a rare and wonderful concurrence of condi- 
tions that, had our forefathers then succumbed in 
the strife, it is hard to imagine how or where 
the failure could have been repaired." " To speak 
of Naseby and Marston Moor as merely English 
victories would be as absurd as to restrict the 
significance of Gettysburg to the State of Penn- 
sylvania. If ever there were men who laid 
down their lives in the cause of all mankind, 
it was those grim old Ironsides whose watch- 
words were texts from Holy Writ, whose battle 
cries were hymns of praise ;" "' among the signifi- 
cant events which prophesied the final triumph of 
the English over the Roman idea, perhaps the 
most significant — the one which marks most 
incisively the dawning of a new era — was the 
migration of English Puritans across the Atlantic 



Ocean, to repeat in a new environment and on a 
far grander scale the work which the forefathers 
had wrought in Britain." 

In the face of such plain facts, in the presence of 
peculiar greatness to which we sons of New England 
gladly give the reverence of our hearts, the text 
just read may seem inappropriate, or even im- 
modest. ^' God having provided some better 
thing for us," — can that be true ? Can we be 
better men than the Puritans, do better work? 
Has God given us a better chance than He gave 
them ? Certainly that contradicts the usual way 
of looking at the matter. It is natural to look 
back with regret to the Puritan days and the 
Puritan spirit, to feel that the best that was there 
has somehow weakened or failed in the process of 
the years. The words may well come to us with 
something of the shock they produced when first 
they came to the descendants of the Hebrews, 
declaring that God had provided for the men of 
the first Christian Century something better than 
has been known by Moses and the kings and 
prophets of Israel's heroic days. 

Of course it is obvious that God has provided 
better things for us than for the fathers, in the 
outward conditions of living. Could we borrow 



the imagination of Hawthorne for an hour, and 
call back one of the sober, sturdy Pilgrim fathers, 
we would no doubt see him vastly impressed by the 
splendor and richness of modern life. Comparing 
our ships with the Mayflower, our docks with Ply- 
mouth Rock, our streets with the winding roads 
of a New England village, our buildings with the 
log cabins, he would confess with amazement that 
God has given us better things than He gave the 
fathers. And when you invited him, as you 
would of course, to the Annual Dinner of your 
Society, he would wonder at the profusion and 
wealth of modern living. It may be that his 
thoughts would turn to Belshazzar's feast, and 
that he would sit in gloom, or stalk from the room 
in severe condemnation ; yet if he were of the 
more genial company that is associated with the 
name of Bradford and the early history of Ply- 
mouth he might acknowledge in all the richness 
of modern living the good gifts of God, and say, 
" Verily, God hath provided better things for you 
than ever we knew." 

And yet, because he was a Puritan, he would 
look deeper. And because we are sons of the 
Puritans, we must get below the surface. We 
know well that when we turn and look at that 



severe figure, outward conditions seem trivial; 
the difference between his homespun dress, simple 
fare, and bare meeting-house, and our rich life in 
home and church, looks very small. We catch 
something in the man's face, the revelation of a 
greatness in his soul, and in our hearts we raise 
the question, ^'Has God provided some letter 
thing for us " ? Are we ahead of the Puritan in 
the real goods of life ? 

What was the best possession of the Puritan, 
that which, more than any other gift, made him 
of supreme worth to the world, and gave dis- 
tinction to his character? It was something 
which has so faded or failed in recent years 
that it is not easy for the children of this 
age to realize it. And so, when we speak 
of the Puritan, it is of his iron determina- 
tion, his hatred of tyi'ants, his zeal for learning, 
his care for the Sabbath, his inspired idea of gov- 
ernment by town-meeting, his rugged simplicity, 
that we speak. But below all these, infinitely 
more important in its power over his character and 
influence, was the one great possession — his sense 
of God. God was to him no mere logical neces- 
sity for his system of philosophy, no name neces- 
sary for the proper discharge of religious func- 



tions. He saw God everywhere. He had caught 
once more, as few men before or since have caught 
it, the spirit of Isaiah, who moved about the 
streets of Jerusalem more conscious of the " eyes 
of the glory of God " than of the gaze of his fel- 
low citizens. With iconoclastic zeal the Puritan 
fought against the Roman Catholic doctrine of 
the Real Presence. The mass was monstrous to 
him. But, whether or no he ever clearly phrased 
it so to himself, he hated the doctrine of the Real 
Presence in the Mass, because he gloried so in the 
real presence of God in his life and in the world. 
It was this sense of God that made him masterful 
and indomitable in the service of righteousness. 
He could not fear kings or great men, for he ever 
stood in the presence of the King of Kings and 
Lord of Lords. John Knox was the despair of 
Mary Stuart, and Cromwell the nemesis of Charles 
Stuart, because Knox and Cromwell were men of 
God, to whom the greatest earthly pomp must 
seem petty. It was this sense of God that formed 
" that great impulse that drove them across the sea." 
They left their homes, and made new homes in 
the wilderness, at awful cost of joy and life, be- 
cause they could not live without God, and the 
rulers would not let them live with Him. They 



staked all on that great yearning for God. It 
was tbeir sense of God that determined their 
ideals and standards, their ways of personal and 
community life. As one of their sons has said — 
'^ The impulse by which they were animated was 
a profoundly ethical impulse — the desire to lead 
godly lives, and to drive out sin from the com- 
munity — the same ethical impulse which animates 
the glowing pages of Hebrew poets and prophets, 
and which has given to the history and literature 
of Israel their commanding influence in the world. 
The Greek, says Matthew Arnold, held that 
the perfection of happiness was to have one's 
thoughts hit the mark; but the Hebrew held 
that it was to serve the Lord day and night." 

It would be easy and natural for us to feel that 
here at least God provided some better things for 
them, than for us. Before this mighty faith of 
theirs, simple but real and regnant, we bow in 
reverence, and with humble confession that we 
have not kept the noblest gift of our fathers. 
There is in us, as we view this great Puritan 
sense of God, something of the feeling of the 
Prodigal, ''I am no more worthy to be called their 
son." Have we anything in our modern life, for 
all its richness and splendor, anything better than 



8 

the strong sense of God wMcli tlie early men of 
New England felt so profoundly ? Have we any- 
thing one-half so good ? 

Perhaps not. There is painful need that we 
search ourselves to see if there was not something 
in that simple life and faith of the fathers to 
regain which would be worth the sacrifice of all 
our rich modern life. 

And yet the text is true : '' God having pro- 
vided some better thing for us." If we are not 
better men, better servants of God, than our 
fathers, it is not because God did more for them 
than He does for us, but because we fail to use 
the far richer provision He makes for our inner 
life. 

For it is simple fact that there is available for 
us to-day a richer, deeper, wider, more powerful, 
consciousness of God than was possible for Crom- 
well, or Milton, or Bradford or Hooker, to attain. 
We have a greater God of whom to be conscious, 
a God better known. Strong as was the God- 
consciousness of the Puritan, it was cramped and 
fettered within narrow forms and faiths and op- 
portunities. Given the vivid God-sense of those 
men in the rich spiritual and social conditions of 
to-day, and the old prophesy would find fulfil- 



ment, '^ Instead of the fathers shall be the chil- 
dren, whom thou shalt make princes in the earth." 

It is high time we ceased laying the blame for 
our impotent lives, our in effective faith, our retreat 
before God's enemies, to the times in which we 
live, saying that it is impossible to maintain the 
Puritan standards and ideals in the conditions of 
the present day. It is time we began to realize 
how much richer, wider, readier an opportunity 
God gives to men of God to-day than He gave to 
the men of the Mayflower ; and that not merely 
nor chiefly in the external conditions of living, 
but in the possibilities of a God-conscious spiritual 
life. There is lying, ready to hand, the chance 
for such godly living as the fathers never imag- 
ined : all that is needed is that we be men enough 
to live with God to-day as they lived with God 
yesterday. 

There is open to us a richer sense of God than 
the Puritan had. To him large realms of thought 
and art and emotion were closed, because God 
was not in them. He moved in a little world, 
because he thought that to move out of it would 
be to lose God. All honor to him that he would 
not go where God seemed to him not to be ! 
That is the spirit most needed in all ages, — the 



10 

determination to let go anything rather than to 
lose hold on God. But to us has come a 
revelation that God is in all of life. 
It is sadly true that many of the sons 
of New England have gone into the wider life 
their fathers shunned, and have lost God as they 
left the narrower life. But it is gloriously true 
that one can move out from the little world in 
which the Puritan moved, into the spacious and 
wonderful countries of art, and science, and 
recreation, and find himself in the presence of a 
God of such beauty, truth, and joy, as could not 
live or be known in the narrower life. The 
Puritan was shut in with God ; we are set free 
with God. If only our souls are great enough to 
use their freedom aright, we can have a sense of 
God, broad, rich, free from cant and unreality 
and conventionality, that shall do for us, and 
through us for the world, greater things than the 
Puritan's sense of God could accomplish. 

God has provided for us a richer sense of the 
godly life than was possible for men of the Seven- 
teenth Century. It may seem strange to assert 
that all the complexity of modern civilization, 
all the wealth and wonder of Twentieth Century 
life, all the startling and clashing movements of 



11 

democracy and of political and social advance, 
make possible the vision and realization of a 
richer ideal of godliness. Why, these are 
the very facts and forces which seem 
to hamper and weaken religion : these are 
what draw men and women from churches, 
and absorb the energies and thoughts that should 
go to the life of the soul, and make hard the way 
of God's prophets and priests. Yes, but by so 
much as the conditions of to-day make the godly 
life a struggle, by so much do they deepen and 
enrich it. What else is the meaning of that 
vision of the Holy City which glows from the 
last pages of the Bible, the city of God built up 
of the wealth and glory and honor of the nations ? 
A nobler life of godliness is open to the man of 
God to-day than was open to the fathers. There 
is a verse in the great faith chapter which sets 
before us vividly in simple words the spirit in 
which the Pilgrims crossed the sea : ^' they de- 
sired a better country ". But did you ever note 
the end of that verse ? It seems written for us, 
as the earlier part for them. '^They desire a 
better country : but God hath prepared for them 
a city''\ 

Their ideal of godly living was to get away 



12 

from the main currents of human life into some 
little bay, where they could, at peace, live with 
God and as Grod would have them live. They 
saved their godliness by separating it. " They 
desired a better country. "^^ But, friends, it is 
time we awoke to the great truth that God is most 
to be found where men and their problems abound : 
that above the godliness that comes through 
seclusion rises the godliness that comes from living 
with God in the thick of human struggle. God 
gave the Pilgrims a better country. But he has 
provided some better thing for us : for He has 
given us a city. 

"• Where cross the crowded ways of life, 
Where sound the cries of race and clan. 
Above the noise of selfish strife. 
We hear Thy voice, O Son of Man." 

That voice calls us to a richer Christliness, a 
nobler godliness, than could ever be gained by 
saint, or mystic, or Puritan, of the past. For he 
who enters strongly into the social sympathies of 
to-day enters more widely and truly into the life 
of God. The Puritan was proud to call himself a 
** Separatist". The ideal of the man needed now 



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is in the words of Lawrence Oliphant, ^' A spirit- 
ually-minded man of the world ". And a spirit- 
ually-minded man of the world has a richer reali- 
zation of true godliness than any Separatist can 
experience. 

God has given to us of to-day also a wider 
sphere, — immeasurably wider, — than was open to 
the men of God in the Seventeenth Century. Their 
horizon was the bounds of the parish. Ours is the 
world. They knew little or nothing of that which 
is the glory of religion to-day, — broad sympathy 
with men of all classes and all races. They found 
satisfaction not only in the fact that they belonged 
to the elect, but in the conviction that eternal 
misery awaited the reprobate. There is, no 
doubt, a danger in the merciful temper of modern 
religion, a danger that it degenerate into weak- 
ness, and lose the strength and truth of insistence 
on exorable moral law with its sure penalties and 
sanctions. But there is in the modern spirit of 
mercy also the possibility of a nobler and more 
gracious sense of God and of godliness, something 
better than the Puritan knew. 

Friends, it is unworthy weakness, dishonoring 
our New England ancestry, and worse, dishonor- 
ing the Living God, our Father, to look back and 



14 

sigh for tlie old days, to think that those men had 
something denied to us, to imagine that we can- 
not be better men of God than they were. Christ 
has put in stinging words His estimate of the men 
whose reverence for the prophets takes shape only 
in building or decorating their tombs. It is 
futile, it is shameful, to think, " perhaps we 
could be such men as they, were we back where 
they were." Honor the great men, our fathers, 
rather, by thinking what they would be, were 
they here, in this greater world, amid these larger 
thoughts, with this richer life, which is ours. One 
of our own New England prophets has reminded 
us that the spirit of the Pilgrims is the spirit that 
looks forward not back. 



15 

'' 'Tis as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves 
Of a legendary virtue carved upon our father's 

graves. 
Worshippers of light ancestral make the present 

light a crime ; — 
Was the Mayflower launched by cowards, steered 

by men behind their time ? 
Turn those tracks toward Past or Future that 

make Plymouth Rock sublime ? 
They were men of present valor, stalwart old 

iconoclasts. 
Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was 

the Past's; 
But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking 

that hath made us free. 
Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our 

tender spirits flee 
The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove 

them across the sea ". 

" That great impulse," — there is the heart of the 
matter. All the richness and possibility of our 
modern life will not avail if we lack that compelling, 
inspiring sense of God which was their life. But 
the richness of our modern life does open to us new 
and greater possibilities of character and influence, 
if we have dominant in us the vivid sense of God. 



16 

And we can have it. Grod is near to the men of 
every age, to be known, and loved, and served, if 
they will. Imagine that little band of heroic 
men and women of God, set down here in the 
city of New York, as once they were set down 
on the bleak shores of Massachusetts — placed 
here in this city, as we, their sons, have been 
placed. Do you not know that the city would 
feel their presence, that all through the church, 
the civil government, the social life, of this city 
would go a dominating power of righteousness 
and truth, a determining purpose of godliness, 
that would be irresistible ? They cannot be 
here : they served their own generation strongly 
and fell asleep. But it is time for the faith to 
arise in us, their sons, that we can do more than 
they did, more than they could do, for we are 
heirs of the good that was in them, and of richer 
good beside. 

But the sense of God that was in them must 
be in us ; and we can find it where they did, in 
the living and abiding word of God. The spirit- 
ual power of the Puritan, his vivid sense of God, 
did it not spring from a new approach to the 
long-neglected Word of God ? Through many 
years men had forgotten the Word of God ; the 



17 

spirit of the prophets and of the Son of Man was 
sealed in a closed book. The Puritan opened 
the Bible once more, found his way to those old 
fountains of inspiration, and the glory of God 
there revealed took possession of his soul. The 
world to-day will wait for the men of God it needs, 
*' the spiritually-minded men of the world," who 
shall do for the world to-day what the Puritans 
did for their age — the world to-day will wait 
until the men of God to-day believe the great 
words of John Robinson in his last sermon to the 
Pilgrims in Holland, " God hath yet more light 
to break forth from His most Holy Word," and 
seek afresh in the newly opened Bible of this day 
the vivid sense of God without which '' nothing 
is strong, nothing is holy," with which the men 
of God, though they be but a little company of 
pilgrims in the midst of a hostile and careless 
world, shall ever be the salt of the earth, the 
light of the world, the remnant through which 
God will work out His mighty purpose of re- 
demption. 



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